Friday, 24 October 2014

Ben Bradlee: scourge of the powerful, but always an establishment man

Ben Bradlee, long-time editor of the Washington Post has been
celebrated around the world since news of his death broke. And his
reputation does indeed remain stellar. But in the rush to praise him,
some…

Author

Speaking truth to power over a dry martini.
Wikimedia Commons
Ben Bradlee, long-time editor of the Washington Post has been celebrated around the world since news of his death broke. And his reputation does indeed remain stellar. But in the rush to praise him, some of his mistakes have been forgotten.
Bradlee built his reputation for integrity as a journalist by
pursuing political corruption in high places but he had old-money roots.
He attended an elite school and followed generations of his family to
Harvard. He was a friend and neighbour to the Kennedys. This background
often appeared to stop him from tackling some of the most pressing
issues of his time.

Truth to power

Being a product of the East Coast establishment, Bradlee believed
firmly in the concept of public service. His pursuit of truth in defence
of constitutional freedoms went beyond party politics. He was as
scathing of the Democrats as he was of Republicans. He was particularly
critical of those who exceeded their powers and led the nation down
paths to disaster in defence of national security.
He did not mince words in 1987,
for example, when giving his assessment of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin
incident. He pointedly accused Lyndon Johnson, who was president at the
time, and his senior advisers of lying and essentially fabricating an
aggression on a US Navy ship by North Vietnam and then using it to push
Congress into authorising US military attacks.

Jim Stockdale, a US Sabre jet fighter pilot, essentially proved that
no such attack had happened when he scoured the area around the ship for
hours, finding nothing. A compliant media, closely nestled at the
centres of political power, took Johnson at face value despite the
evidence and reported the incident as the government described it. Much
later, it turned out that Johnson had ordered military provocations
against North Vietnam. He was trying to bring about an “incident” to be
used as an excuse for American military intervention.

But even though Bradlee later lamented the manipulation, he chose not
to publish details of the Tonkin deception as part of his coverage of
the Pentagon Papers in 1971. By omitting the information, he let The New York Times take one of the biggest scoops of the 20th century.

East Coast guy

Bradlee’s establishment roots coloured his work at at other times
too. Despite being an enlightened East Coast patrician, he never
questioned the character of the American racial order, even during the
1950s and 1960s. For him, as much as the broader political system, the
civil rights and black power movements came out of the blue and never
received the kind of sympathetic coverage they deserved.
Most famously, Bradlee backed junior reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein during their investigations into the Watergate scandal.
It was a story that eventually led all the way to the White House and
the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974. But it should not be forgotten
that in going after Nixon, Bradlee was helping the Democrats.

Nor was the Washington Post ever really concerned with the violent
repression of groups that sat outside the mainstream, such as the
Socialist Workers’ Party or the Black Panthers. Both stood for radical
alternatives to the economic and racial disparities of the US but were
destroyed by J Edgar Hoover and the FBI in the late 1960s and early
1970s – just when the Watergate scandals broke.
In the end, though, Bradlee was a great newspaper man and his memoir,
A Good Life, remains one of the most interesting, enlightening and
self-deprecating of autobiographies. He was a product of his time and of
the American East coast establishment but he inspired a generation of
investigative reporters and continues to set a significant example
today.

Thursday, 2 October 2014

The current hysteria shown by both politicians and the mainstream media
about Islamic State (IS) is so devoid of reason and factual evidence
that it is difficult to know where to start in formulating a corrective.
As a researcher who has studied terrorism and
political violence since 1987, I can say with some confidence that
virtually every single statement about the purported threat posed by IS,
or the reasons why a small number of Muslims in Western countries want
to travel to Iraq to fight with them, is mostly,
if not completely, incorrect. More importantly, based on years of
research, I can say with confidence that the recent actions taken by
Western countries in response to the purported threat – particularly the
decision to bomb IS and to arm groups opposed to
it, as well as the decision to try and ban individuals from travelling
to Iraq – will at best completely fail to bring peace and security to
the region; at worst, these policies will lead directly to more
terrorism and violence, worsen the situation greatly
and create a predictable self-fulfilling prophesy.

In fact, any intelligent observer of events in the Middle East can work
out that the rise of IS is, in the first instance, the direct result of
years of reckless Western military intervention in Iraq and Syria. The
invasion of Iraq, particularly the disbanding
of the Iraqi army and Western support for the corrupt and brutal
al-Maliki government, lead directly to the formation of al Qaeda in Iraq
(AQI). For its part, over the years of brutal internecine conflict and
insurgency in Iraq since 2003, AQI has more recently
morphed into IS. At the same time, the West and its Gulf allies have
covertly supported anti-Assad rebels in Syria with weapons and training
funneled through Turkey. Some of these groups have now defected to IS.
In effect, short-sighted, ill-informed Western
policy has contributed directly to the political and strategic
conditions that have allowed IS to grow into the force it is today. This
is called ‘blowback’ in intelligence circles.

As if this disastrous recent history was not enough, the longer history
of Western air campaigns shows that it is quite ineffective in winning
wars or creating the conditions for peace, especially against rebel
movements like IS. The truth is, bombing has an
almost zero chance of defeating IS, as six weeks of intensive bombing
already shows. In other words, Western countries have decided to adopt a
strategy that has virtually no chance of succeeding, and which in the
very recent past helped to create the very
problem it is now trying to solve. If the definition of insanity, as
Einstein put it, is undertaking the same action over and over again
while expecting a different result, then the decision to bomb Iraq for
the third time in three decades is a perfect example
of insanity.

In addition to ignoring recent history and evidence in relation to the
perils of military intervention in the region, Western countries have
also decided that IS poses a direct threat to them, and have banned
individuals from travelling to Iraq to fight for
them. The logic here is that foreign fighters will be radicalized by IS
and will return home to wage jihad on their home countries. This is
more than a little ridiculous: if individuals have decided to make the
dangerous journey to Iraq where they have a high
chance of being killed in a brutal war, they are already
well-radicalized. In fact, preventing potential fighters from going
overseas risks aspiring jihadists turning their attention to targets
closer to home. If a thwarted fighter launches an attack on London
or Sydney in the next few months, it will be nothing more a completely
predictable self-fulfilling prophesy.

In fact, the ignorance and short-sightedness of this policy is
highlighted by the fact that out of the many thousands who have
travelled to Afghanistan, Bosnia, Somalia, Syria and Iraq over previous
decades, less than a handful of returned fighters have subsequently
become engaged in terrorist activities. Instead, as Denmark is
currently finding, many returned fighters are traumatized and
disillusioned by their experiences. In effect, they have been
de-radicalised after finding that the noble cause they thought they were
fighting for was lost in the squalid brutality of internecine war. In
other words, according to the best academic evidence available, the
threat posed by returning fighters is extremely low. It certainly does
not warrant the hysterical response we are currently
seeing in the United Kingdom and other European countries. The
Australian government’s reaction is particularly over-the-top:
restricting press freedoms, confiscating passports and whipping up
anti-Muslim hysteria will do nothing except create social conflict
and disorder.

On the other hand, every major terrorist attack on Western targets since
2001, including the attacks in Bali, Madrid, London and Boston, has
been claimed by the perpetrators to be revenge for Western military
intervention in the Middle East. Even the beheadings
of Western hostages were justified by IS captors as a response to US
bombing. In fact, every major academic study of the past ten years has
confirmed that Western military intervention and its policies in the
Middle East, including support for the state of
Israel, is the primary motivation for anti-Western terrorist attacks.
In 1996, a major study by the CATO Institute concluded that U.S.
military intervention overseas was the primary driver of anti-American
terrorism. The Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism
has drawn the same fundamental conclusion. In other words, the greater
risk of terrorism comes not from returning fighters, but from the
decision to bomb Iraq once again.

There is no doubt that IS is a brutal insurgent group. However, it is
far from the worst such group we have seen in recent decades, and the
current measures designed to tackle it will achieve nothing but further
blowback. New Zealand has thus far not succumbed
to the overreaction and hysteria of Australia, the UK, the US and other
European countries. In considering whether to respond to IS, the New
Zealand government would be well advised to pay due attention to the
academic evidence, rather than ill-informed, knee-jerk
reactions and ignorant media speculation. There is plenty of good
research and information which could help to make reasonable and
effective policies. However, the media and politicians need to take the
time to consult it, instead of rushing headlong into
another completely pointless and self-defeating war.

This article was originally published as an op-ed in the Otago Daily Times
on Wednesday 1 October 2014. Originally, I had entitled it, 'The
Insanity of Western Foreign Policy', but I presumed it would not get
published under that heading.